5. ‘No Country for Old Men’ and ‘W.’ | Mission Accomplished

0:02On the night of November 7, 2000, Oliver Stone sat down to watch the results of the presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. As the results started coming in, and it looked like Bush might win, Stone told me he was feeling worried. It was very scary to me that I thought something was fucked up, frankly. He'd actually met Bush a year before the election, during an event for graduates of Yale University. He was a very cheery man and gentlemanly, but certainly there was a hint that there was something behind him. Stone got the feeling that Bush was being controlled by others, that they dictated the way he talked and the way he thought.

0:44There was a sense of a brainwashed president, I'd say. Everything was very programmed, like a Manchurian candidate. In early 2001, after Bush had been sworn in, Stone tried to remain optimistic. I didn't know where the country was going, and I was kind of hoping that, you know, you always wish a new president well, no matter what, even if you don't like him. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Stone's goodwill toward the new president disappeared. He believed that the Bush administration had rushed into battle without thinking. They declared the enemy before they even knew who they were.

1:21And they started to impose all kinds of emergency measures. They created a state of emergency in the country, like this was the worst thing that had ever happened in the United States.

1:35From the 1980s through the 2000s, Stone was one of the most influential writer-directors in the world. A filmmaker whose big ideas about American history, some of which were very controversial, shifted how many Americans felt about the country's darker moments. As a Vietnam War vet, he looked at the violence of that conflict, and its aftermath, in movies like Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. He dove into the mysteries surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy in the Oscar-winning drama JFK. And he examined the greed and corruption of the 1980s in Wall Street. When it comes to trying times, Stone is kind of an expert.

2:12And he sees the early 2000s as our lowest point yet.

2:18Well, I could say from the beginning of the 21st century on, it was downhill. As a decade went on, Stone became even more frustrated. And before Bush left office, the director began working on a movie that would look at the man Stone believed had veered the country off course. I wanted to bring focus on who this man Bush was. The result was W, a biopic starring Josh Burl and his Bush. Unlike many of Stone's earlier films, W was kind of restrained. The movie follows the president from his college frat house to his Texas ranch and all the way up to the White House. Throughout, Bush comes off as sincere, but kind of a lightweight.

2:59A guy who maybe should have paid a little more attention to all those ideas being fed into his head. And to the words coming out of his mouth. And I'm just so bone-tired of this Saddam. He's always misunderstood. Released in 2008, W was Stone's attempt to understand how one man's actions had led to so much destruction. That kind of domino effect was explored in a very different movie from the year before. This film was also about a Texas tough guy who gets in way over his head. His name is Llewellyn Moss, and he's a Vietnam vet who stumbles upon a bunch of bodies in the desert, right near a suitcase carrying$2 million.

3:38He decides to take the money and run, an act of greed that sets off a disastrous chain of events, one that will lead to even more dead bodies, including his own. The effects will do something dumber now, but I'm going anyways. I'm sure you recognize that voice It's Josh Brolin again And you definitely recognize the movie No Country for Old Men Though it was set in the early 1980s No Country for Old Men felt like it was taking the Bush years head on The movie was a reminder that greed, violence, and sheer hubris had long been part of America's legacy No Country for Old Men and W arrived just as the Bush era was winding down and both movies prompted audiences to take stock of the 21st century so far.

4:23How had we gotten here? And was our present really so different from our past? We never learned anything from history. That's the American way. We lay it out in front of us, we know, and we go blundering in again. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is Mission Accomplished. Episode 5, No Country for Old Men, and W.

4:55In early 2008, Jon Stewart, who was a very underrated Oscars host, in my opinion, kicked off the annual awards ceremony with a question for the thousands of Hollywood filmmakers and executives in attendance. Does this town need a hug? What? What? What happened? Stewart was joking. Kind of. He was referring to some of that year's contenders, all of which had been released in 2007. The nominees included There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a sociopathic oil man who beats his longtime foe to death with a bowling pin. But before that, he delivers what's probably the most quotable farewell fuck you of all time.

5:38I drink your milkshake. I drink it up! There Will Be Blood was one of the night's very downbeat but very satisfying nominees. Along with Michael Clayton, Atonement, the assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford, the diving bell and the butterfly. I mean, none of that year's contenders went down easy. Even Juno was pretty tough at times. Then there was the bleakest film of them all, a movie that wound up winning four awards that night, including Best Picture. And the Oscar goes to Joel Cohen and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men. No Country for Old Men. And the Oscar goes to No Country for Old Men.

6:28The Best Picture award had gone to some pretty heavy movies in the 2000s. Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, Crash. But none were as violent, nor as relentless, as No Country for Old Men. Based on a 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, the filmmaking brothers behind such classic crime dramas as Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Fargo. To be honest, I hate the word classic, but I don't know how else you'd describe those movies. As Joel Coen told Charlie Rose, the filmmakers knew they could have made a very safe, very Hollywood version of McCarthy's novel.

7:07But that would have betrayed an idea that runs throughout the book. An idea that, in America, carnage isn't just possible. It's inevitable. You can tell the Coens were determined not to water down McCarthy's book. You know, it's about a character confronting a very arbitrary, violent, brutal world. And you have to see that. No Country for Old Men stars Tommy Lee Jones as Ed Tom Bell, an aging sheriff in a remote West Texas town.

7:41As the film opens in 1980, Sheriff Bell is lamenting the bloodshed he's witnessed in his lifetime, bloodshed that he can no longer comprehend. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. Sheriff Bell eventually finds himself at a gruesome crime scene in the desert, where several men have been shot dead, their bodies left baking in the sun. They'd been killed over a briefcase stuffed with cash. More than$2 million. The case had been stolen by Llewellyn Moss, a local hunter who goes on the run with the money. Played by Brolin, Llewellyn is tough, quick-thinking, and thoroughly unflappable.

8:18Not unlike those big-screen, all-American optimists Hollywood was celebrating when the decade began. At one point in the movie, Llewellyn's wife, played by Kelly MacDonald, expresses her concerns about the stolen cash. In her voice, you can hear a mix of exasperation and fear. I got a bad feeling, Llewellyn. Well, I got a good one, so that ought to even out. But her premonition turns out to be spot on. Llewellyn is being pursued by a psychopathic hitman named Anton Chigurh, who's played by Javier Bardem. Anton travels through Texas armed with this massive bolt pistol, the kind of device you use to shoot cattle in the head.

8:57He also possesses one of the worst haircuts of all time. I'm not even sure how to describe it, except to say that it always kind of reminds me of Slinky Dog from Toy Story. Anton is so lethal that another violent loner, a bounty hunter played by Woody Harrelson, is sent to track him down. This is a classic Woody performance, by the way. He has this low-key menace that gives him a kind of relaxed edginess. Anyway, his character warns Llewellyn not to mess with the dreaded Anton Chigurh. You've seen him. Man, you're not dead. What's this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass? He is. And as Anton pursues Llewellyn, and his briefcase full of money, the body count rises.

9:44No Country for Old Men is a lot of things. A neo-Western, a chase movie, a killer on the loose flick. And it does all of those things perfectly.

9:56But I don't think that's why this movie felt so monumental when it opened in the fall of 2007, or why it got such enthusiastic reviews. This is a movie that sticks with you for days. In fact, kind of nags at you. It's a movie that constantly reminds you of your own powerlessness, that your life can be altered, or even ended, in just a single moment, in ways that you never saw coming, and for reasons you'll never understand. Back then, that was something that audiences understood all too well. And it's a point that's hammered home in the film's most famous scene. It takes place early on in the movie, at a remote gas station where Anton, who's already killed two people, is making what was supposed to be a quick pit stop.

10:39How much? 69, see. The store's owner, played by Gene Jones, then asks his customer a seemingly innocuous question about the weather, a question that clearly enrages Anton, whose mood turns menacing. I know I'm simplifying things here when it comes to describing this scene, but I can't get into every detail. I mean, it's almost five minutes long. Anton interrogates the store owner before slapping a quarter down on the counter. Then he tells this very confused man to call it. Heads or tails? Well, we need to know what we're calling it for here. You need to call it. I can't call it for you. It wouldn't be fair.

11:20I didn't put nothing up. Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life. You just didn't know it. At this point, it's clear to the gas station owner and the audience that there's a lot weighing on the outcome of this coin toss. That's the whole setup. Two guys in a gas station talking at the counter about a coin toss. No flashy camera work and barely any music. And yet this scene, it's terrifying. The Coens never told us this, but we both knew that the tension should escalate in such a gradual manner that you were not aware of tension escalating. That's actor Gene Jones, who played the gas station owner.

12:05There's no point where you think, oh my God, something awful is about to happen. But there is kind of a boiling point that you get to and you keep boiling and keep boiling very slowly. Boil, boil, boil. Jones hadn't read Cormac McCarthy's novel when he took the part in No Country for Old Men. In fact, he was never offered a chance to look at the full script, and he didn't care. My scene is the Bible, and that's all I need. Still, Jones was surprised when he got to the set in New Mexico and realized the directors didn't have many notes for him. They didn't tell me much of anything, which made me uneasy.

12:51It was, I think, the first major role I ever had in film. So I wanted some direction, and they weren't of a mind to give it. Over the course of filming the scene, which Jones says took just a little more than two hours to complete, the Coen brothers tried to stay out of view. Neither Joel nor Ethan watched it while we shot it. And Joel kind of folded up in a corner behind the counter and listened. Ethan walked outside and put his ear to the window so he could listen. And they listened, listened, listened, and they never really watched it. This is dorky, even for me. But I listened to the scene with the screen turned off.

13:37And somehow, it's even more unsettling. Without being able to see the actor's reactions, you get the sense that the conversation has no rules, no rhythm. It's as if things could take a dark turn at any moment. And you can hear how much control Anton has over the cashier. It's like the guy's being read his last rites, and he doesn't even realize it.

14:03Whatever the Coens were listening for, they found it. The scene keeps boiling, boiling, boiling, until finally, Anton tosses the quarter. You know what date is on this coin? No. 1958. It's been traveling 22 years to get here. And now it's here. And it's either heads or tails. And you have to say, call it. The gas station cashier chooses heads. And wins. There are a lot of elements that make this scene so memorable. There's Anton's casual evil, which is so terrifying. And there's the cashier's confusion, which is so relatable. Still, the real reason this sequence is so affecting is that, while the coin fell in the guy's favor this time around, eventually, the odds are going to catch up with him.

14:52He's just realized that the isolated, comfortable, and unexamined life he's been living can end at any time. In fact, it will end. It all comes down to the flip of a coin. What's so terrifying about this scene for me is that, you know, this whole movie is kind of about inevitability, and in this scene, everything's about to spiral, and you think you can control things, but that's not the way life works. In life, it all catches up with you at some point. Yes, yes. The appointment in Samara, the old Middle East story about death won't catch me today because I'm going to Samara. You know, and of course, that's where death is going the next day too.

15:28There's another key scene from No Country for Old Men that gets at this idea of just how little say we have over our own fates. It happens later on in the film when Tommy Lee Jones' character, Ed Tom Bell, visits an older relative named Ellis. From the minute they start talking, it's clear the two men have a distant relationship. How you been, Ellis? You're looking at it. Ellis, a retired lawman, sits in the kitchen of a beaten-down house in the middle of nowhere. He's in a wheelchair and lives by himself, surrounded by feral cats. Ellis is played by Barry Corbin, whom you've seen in all sorts of movies and TV shows over the years.

16:09War games, Northern Exposure, Tulsa King. Trust me, you know him. I spoke to Corbin from his home in Texas. He was born and raised in the state, not far from where No Country for Old Men is set. You know, it's in my bones. I grew up in that part of the country. I know what that country's like. It is not easy. You know, anything that grows is going to stick you. anything that's wild and walking around is going to bite you or eat you. His scene with Tommy Lee Jones was shot way out in the desert of Marfa, Texas, in a house that held its own real-life dangers. You could stomp your foot and you'd hear rattlesnakes under the floor.

16:53I said, make sure you keep account of those cats, because if one of them gets out, you'll never see them again. And if you watch the movie again, you see when Tommy Lee comes in the front door, a cat runs out. And it's gone. One never saw it again. The conversation between Ellis and the sheriff is just a few minutes long. And on the surface, it seems pretty straightforward. Just two people talking in a room. The only noise is the wind whooshing outside the house. But as with the coin toss scene, there's a lot more going on under the surface. Ellis was shot years earlier. and is now disabled. But he tells Sheriff Ed Tom Bell that he's not angry about it.

17:37Well, all the time you spend trying to get back what's been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while, you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it. By this point in the movie, Sheriff Bell has seen Anton's handiwork, and he tells Ellis that it's made him feel, quote, overmatched, that he feels powerless in the face of all this violence, Violence the sheriff believes is unprecedented. But Ellis sets him straight. He tells Sheriff Bell a story about the murder of another family member more than 70 years earlier. That man was killed in front of his wife and buried the next day in the hard ground.

18:16What Ellis is really saying is that all that bloodshed the sheriff's been seeing isn't some new invention. It's always been there. And it's not going away. and only a fool would believe that violence could somehow be contained or avoid it altogether. Ellis then offers a closing thought that, for me at least, makes this the single best scene of any film from the 2000s. What you got ain't nothing new. This country's hard on people.

18:49You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you.

18:58That's vanity. You can't stop what's coming. It's a simple enough idea, but it's one that's rarely presented as starkly as it is in No Country for Old Men.

19:14I asked Barry Corbin about that line, about why it resonates so strongly with moviegoers. Well, it's actually very true. You know, the, uh, I don't want to go into this too deep, but last night... Corbin then told me a story. The night before our interview, a friend of his, a guy he's known for more than 25 years, came over to the actor's house. The two of them tried to get together every once in a while to watch a movie and drink some beers. And that night, after the movie, the friend collapsed and died in front of him. So that, you never do know what's coming, do you? We're never in control.

19:57It's like owning things. You don't own anything. You know, you get here naked and you leave naked, and that's the way it goes. There are a lot of hard truths in No Country for Old Men. It's a movie about how we have no control over our lives, no matter what we tell ourselves. And it's about how we'll never get back what we've lost. Those sentiments felt especially spot on when No Country for Old Men was released in late 2007. For the last several years, it had felt as though the nation was spinning out of control. 9-11, Katrina, Iraq, the economy. It was enough to make anyone feel powerless. And anxious.

20:35Like there was always some rattlesnake under the floor. But it was those truths that made No Country for Old Men feel almost comforting when it came out. I realize that's a weird way to describe a movie where people get shot in the head with a bolt pistol. But when I saw No Country for Old Men back in 2007, I thought, oh man, thank God somebody else realizes just how fucked up everything's always been.

21:01Still, while it felt good to watch a movie that seemed to be calling out the destruction of the last few years, No Country for Old Men doesn't go down easy. At the end of the film, Anton Chigur is still on the loose. After killing Llewellyn's widow, Anton is struck by a car. He's badly injured, so he bribes a couple of kids for a new shirt and for their silence. Then Anton wanders down the street as police sirens roar in the distance. Does Anton eventually get caught? Or does he simply keep moving on? No Country for Old Men has a catchy tagline on the poster. There are no clean getaways. But in the 2000s, it had become clear that that notion wasn't entirely true.

21:45During the Bush years, we learned that evil plays by its own rules, just like it does today.

21:58Oliver Stone didn't set out to spend so much of the 2000s making movies about the 2000s. I never chased the news, because you can't. By the time you make the movie, it comes out. It's just things have moved on, and it would be a mistake. But halfway through the decade, Stone read a script about an event that was still on everyone's minds, the attacks of September 11th. The screenplay, written by Andrea Berloff, was about two police officers injured during the attack on the World Trade Center. To no one's surprise, when news broke that Stone's next film would be about 9-11, some people were outraged.

22:37He had a reputation for blending fact and myth in ways that could be unsettling. In the movie JFK, Stone had unleashed multiple conspiracy theories about the president's assassination. And in the film The Doors, he'd managed to make the drugged-up rock scene of the 1960s seem even more outrageous. Stone always filtered major historical moments through his own viewpoints, a habit that tends to piss off historians and experts. And there were concerns that the filmmaker would use 9-11, which was still very much a raw wound, to make a political statement. When Stone's World Trade Center movie was announced, columnist Mickey Kaus noted, quote, Stone will probably have some wacky, conspiratorial left-wing theory to add into the script.

23:19Is Hollywood so out of touch? There were so many groups that came to us and said, you know, you can't do this movie this way, and you can't do it in New York, and you can't show that. We knew it was a very sensitive issue. The filmmakers did their research, meeting with those who witnessed the attacks. I mean, we dealt with all the rescuers. Many of them are in the movie, and it was quite something to see all those people and to talk to the survivors and get a sense. We relived that day.